Dr. Shi holds Ph.D. and Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. Her doctoral research focused on large-scale optimization for online retail inventory management.

As an experienced Operations Research and Optimization Engineer, Dr. Shi specializes in large-scale optimization methods, with deep expertise across areas including:

• Online retail inventory management
• Promotion scheduling and pricing revenue management
• Python optimization programming interfaced with Gurobi and Xpress
• Data analytics and visualization with Python and Pandas
• Mixed-integer programming (MIP) models
• Simulation-based optimization
• Column generation
• Dynamic programming (DP)
• Distributed optimization

Formerly, as a Research Scientist at Amazon, she proposed and developed a new mixed-integer program that enabled key promotion decisions to be made jointly across products and time horizons, replacing the status quo siloed process with a more integrated and holistic strategy. She implemented a working prototype in Python and Xpress, utilizing historical data to demonstrate a significant improvement of 4-6% in the business objective for a key use case, thereby advancing the project toward production and adoption. She collaborated with business stakeholders to translate their objectives and constraints into mathematical models and deliver optimization results as actionable recommendations.

While at MIT, Dr. Shi developed scalable, computationally efficient mathematical models and solution methods for the key decisions of inventory placement and replenishment in online retail fulfillment centers. Her Master’s thesis focused on fast distributed first-order optimization methods. She designed an improved framework for multi-agent networks to jointly optimize the sum of local objective functions, with a provable convergence rate guarantee that outperforms existing methods.

In addition to her industry and academic contributions, Dr. Shi served as an instructor at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, where she taught Operations Management (undergraduate core) and Python Programming for Business Analytics (undergraduate elective).

To work with Optimization Engineer Dr. Shi, please visit our quote page and request her in the description area.